What we've been playing - door kicking, cursed oil rigs, and surprisingly still-powerful old games
A few of the things that have us hooked this week.
12th July 2024
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we've been playing over the past few days. This week we've been revisiting games we thought we never would, because now we know the ending; we've been tip-toeing around on cursed oil rigs, enjoying the details but not the horrific monster that lurks there; and we've been kicking down doors. We've had a smashing time.
What have you been playing?
You can catch up with the older editions of this column in our What We've Been Playing archive.
Still Wakes The Deep, PC
My entire life has been consumed by Elden Ring these past weeks, so I thought I'd break up my gaming time with the perfect palette cleanser: walking around twisty-turny corridors while trying to escape a horrible cosmic monster. Wait… was I still playing Shadow of the Erdtree or Still Wakes The Deep?
The oil rig definitely has a certain FromSoft-ness about it - in the way each of its sections loops back around to other areas you visited previously - but it is of course a 100 percent linear journey from start to finish. Still, its whole 'Sorry pal, engineering is literally on fire right now because our mate erupted into a giant meat monster with razor sharp whips for legs' schtick does capture the same kind of trepidation I've felt when sidling up to various Erdtree nasties, and I desperately wish FromSoft afforded you the same kinds of courtesies by being able to distract its mangey inhabitants by chucking cans of Coke and hammers into the distance.
The rig itself has a wonderful personality to it as well. Apart from being extremely ramshackle and clearly failing every health and safety standard going, with its duct-taped wooden planks forming a legit route down to the lifeboats, its thinly carpeted floors and low-hanging overhead lights look and feel exactly on point - bringing back memories of classrooms and old school canteens. I also love the oily effect that bubbles and pops in your peripheral vision whenever you come into contact with its supernatural meat mass. It might be one of my favourite visual effects of the year, that - the oil, not the meat. The meat monster can burn in the same fires as Erdtree's Messmer the Impaler, as far as I'm concerned. And Bayle. He can get in the meat bin too. Horrible things, the lot of them.
-Katharine
Anger Foot, PC
This week I have been greatly enjoying kicking doors. I was allowed to do it! Devolver had a door with a kick-plate set up for an Anger Foot event in Brighton, and I did what was asked of me and kicked it. It made lots of noise and it was fun.
The point of the plate was to emphasise the importance of kicking in the game, of course. Anger Foot is a Roguelike first-person shooter (technically a Rogue-lite but I don't like the permutations of the word) where you see how far through corridor-heavy levels you can get before being killed and having to start again. The key differentiator is your kick. You don't open doors, you kick them down, and when you kick them down, the door goes flying in whichever direction you kicked it in. As do boxes and crates. As do enemies. As does anything you happen to hoof. You have a gun but it has limited bullets, so it has limited use (shout out to games that then let you chuck your gun at the enemy, in a kind of rampant consumerism tantrum), which means the kick is a vital part of your strategy in the game. Line a kick up correctly - and this a corridor-based game so there's plenty of opportunities to line up kick up correctly - and you cause a wonderful chain-reaction of carnage.
Someone at the Anger Foot event summed up the game perfectly when they called it "a first-person Hotline Miami". It's exactly that. There are short, frenetic bursts of activity after you boot down doors and try to clear areas before enemies kill you. It's fast, it's hard, you restart sections again and again, and it overflows with a thumping feeling of forward momentum. It will appeal to the high score game-player in you; it's terrifically hard to put down. Hoof!
-Bertie
Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Xbox Series X
How do you judge a game that hinges on a single moment? I remember hearing this question a lot around the time Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons first arrived, around 10 years ago.
After playing Brothers back then, I remember describing the game as a 6/10 experience with an 11/10 resolution, and have since resisted revisiting it. After all, I'd now seen The Thing everyone describes as one of the best payoffs in video game mechanics and narrative. Why put myself through a middling adventure game again to rewatch a story moment I'd already seen play out?
I have finally begun replaying it now because it's currently on Game Pass, and I've found the opposite to be true. Knowing that moment is coming casts what happens before it in a different light. There's a tension to it all as the story foreshadows what's to come. Brothers still stands up, and a decade on, it's not diminished by knowing the twist - and after all that time, I'm not entirely sure I remember how it plays out anyway. If you're yet to play it, give it a go. Even if you have played it, you might be surprised at how impactful a fresh run can be.
-Tom